this was a good idea? when was that?

I'm on the 12-hour bus from Valdivia to Valparaiso. The beer and cafe helado are not doing me any favors, especially since I'm stuck in the cama [bed] class, which costs more than twice as much as the semi-cama, and turns out to be horrid. It's a double-level bus, and the cama class is on the lower level, with huge cushy chairs that open almost to horizontal, but it's dark, muggy, airless, has more noise and vibration, and smells funky. I'm wishing I'd thought at the beginning to ask a top-floor passenger to switch with me.

I've thought about Anna a lot this week. To some extent, that's because I'm not being present and engaged in what's happening, and it's fun to daydream about being with her again. I cut myself some slack for disengaging, since I'm living in a foreign country, and the last three or four weeks of school veered away from the more interesting and rewarding parts of teaching: proctoring tests, giving tests, doing review for tests. And last week I didn't even take my classes, I just did the oral test with kids who had missed it, and then went and did computer stuff in the teachers' lounge.

This won't do, of course, and we're supposed to jump into the second semester, recharged and ready to do stuff. I do want to change stuff about how I teach, and start an aikido class at the school, however restricted because we don't have mats. Right now I'm just sort of tired.

(Incidentally, today marks the 4-month anniversary of my WorldTeach group arriving in Chile.)

It feels absurd to be living life away from Anna, because we make such a dramatically awesome pair that it seems silly that I would walk away from it for a year. More than silly, maybe; "stupid" isn't a bad word.

This is in hindsight, of course; the year away was already in the planning stages when we started dating, and the commitments had been made by the time she discovered how amazing I am we discovered how well we work together. And since she had nothing to do with my internal reasons for coming, those reasons didn't change just because our relationship did. The problem with adapting to things as they happen is that I lose my emotional memory of what came before. I've been so caught up in the daily life of teaching for 3 months that I have to dig to find the feelings that brought me here:

• Wanting to do some direct good with people.
• Wanting to live and work in another country.
• Wanting to try out teaching.
• Wanting to do something more difficult for me.

Am I done yet?